The “Break it Down” Blog

Talk about timing… for Christmas this year I bought my mom the Canon SD700, and incredible camera. For the longest time I’ve had my Canon S400 and it has been good to me. But playing with my mom’s new SD600 this Christmas really made me want a new camera.

That’s all good and well.

So I break out the S400 today to grab some shots of some equipment I’ll be eBaying soon and go to turn it on, and the thing is shot not to mention has something broken shaking around inside of it. Trying to take a picture yields a completely black screen, and trying to connect to the computer to get pictures off of it won’t work either. Not to mention that after turning it on, it goes into a stand by mode where nothing works but it won’t retract the lens… very strange.

Anyway, I started digging around, excited that we get to get a new camera and have been trying to decide between the Canon SD800 and SD900. As it turns out this review from DCRP sums up why I’ve been so confused at the lack of fanfare around the SD900 and it is simply:

While the SD900 is the flagship of the ELPH lineup, the SD800 is arguably more interesting than that camera, which is basically a 10 Megapixel version of the SD550 built to satisfy Canon’s marketing department.

So as it turns out, the SD800 is really the leading tech-edge of the Canon point-and-shoot cameras, while the SD900 was just to get Canon’s foot in the 10MP door.

Another nice touch of the SD800 is that it supports SDHC, the new SD High Capacity memory. Another nice thing about this new type of memory is that the SD Association set forth standards for the speeds of the new memory as far as minimum required sustained write speeds. So instead of seeing burst-only speeds advertised, this ram has to achieve a minimum consistent write speed. The classes are as follows:

• Class 2: 2 MB/s
• Class 4: 4 MB/s
• Class 6: 6 MB/s

And these will be shown on the memory as (2), (4) and (6) in little circles respectively. Here’s an example of some SanDisk ram for sale on Newegg, check under the Specifications, it says Class 2 speed (pfffbbbt!).

Engadget covered some news by Transcend and SanDisk about their new Class 6 speed cards, so I think I’ll be chasing one of those down.

Update #1: Looks like Transcend has pretty damn reasonable prices at their online store. Here is their 4GB, SDHC Class 6 memory for $89.

Update #2: Ordered the camera from Newegg and ordered the memory from Transcend. Got shipping notifications for both, woohoo!